The Journey to Staff Engineer In Big Tech (Panel Discussion) - Sep 2023

The journey to Staff Engineer is unique for everybody. In this session, we talk about all the ways we got there! Senior Engineer is a terminal level at most tech companies.

Staff Engineer is the next level up. This is referred to as Staff at Meta/Google, or Principal Engineer at Amazon/Microsoft.

Themes discussed in the video:

• Staff Engineers need to have multiplicative impact and influence across multiple teams. There are several ways to achieve this (occasionally referred to as archetypes): code machine, architect, product thinking, fixer, and more.
• Communication, and right-sizing it to the level and discipline of your audience, is critically important.
• Being able to speak to real, quantifiable numbers when it comes to the impact you have is essential.
• Staff engineers are typically known as the experts in certain domains or situations. Becoming well-known in an area is a skill and does require some amount of marketing.

See discussions about Staff Engineers on Taro: https://www.jointaro.com/topic/staff-engineer/

Publicly available promotion stories:

• Ryan's Instagram video processing improvements
• Rahul's internal tool for debugging

Panelists:

• Zach Wilson
• Rahul Pandey
• Carly Taylor
• Lee McKeeman
• Ryan Peterman

Watch the Q&A portion of the panel here.